How Long Can You Go Without Power?

Around 8:30 am on Monday morning, a large storm (called a "derecho") moved through the Chicago area.  Brian & I had checked the radar before leaving for work and the storm showed it was still out near Iowa, so we expected it to blow in somewhere around 11 am or so.  Completely wrong.  With a speed of over 70 mph, it reached us in less than 2 hours.  It seemed to have come out of nowhere.  It was over as quickly as it got here, but it left a ton of damage and hundreds of thousands of people without power.  Trees were falling everywhere and it even blew a semi truck over on the highway.  Thankfully, we did not lose our power and our big oak tree in the back yard survived.  Around 9:30 am, I got a call from Hailey's daycare that their power had not been restored and parents needed to come pick up their children.  Brian was getting ready to board his flight at the airport and I had a doctor's appointment I couldn't miss.  So, thankfully my mom was able to get there to pick her up.

Unfortunately the next day, daycare still had no power (and neither did my parents) and Brian was out of town, so I had no other alternative than to take Hailey to work with me for half a day so I could attend a meeting.  Rescheduling was difficult because cell service was also down in many areas and I was not able to get ahold of the person we were meeting with.  Oh well, you have to do what you have to do.  I then worked from home for the rest of the day (again very grateful I had power at our house to do that!).  My parents were still without power by the end of the day, so they spent the night at our house that night.  Thankfully the temperatures had cooled off during the middle of the week, so you could open your windows to cool off the house.  After 48 hours with no electricity, food starts to go bad in your refrigerator and freezer, so my parents brought over what they wanted to save from theirs.

Daycare finally got their power back on Tuesday night, so Hailey was able to return to school on Wednesday and Brian & I had a normal work day.  My parents were still without power, but it was a cool night, so they didn't need to spend the night with us.  Their power finally returned at around 7:30 pm Thursday night.

It's quite an experience to be without electricity for 3-4 days straight...you probably can't imagine it without going through it.  By the third day, I saw how emotionally spent several people were who still didn't have their power restored.  Hailey's daycare director was one of them and her house has septic, which meant no water either.  She has two young girls and she said it has just been taxing.  Imagine trying to find things to do...you can't watch TV, go on the internet, do laundry, vacuum the house, run the dishwasher, talk on the phone, cook dinner (how expensive and unhealthy eating out every night would be), etc.  You go to bed as soon as it gets dark, because the only thing you can do is read by candlelight or flashlight.  Most of the doctor's offices were without power and even hospitals were running on generators.  You feel so disconnected from the rest of the world.  Cell service was out in many areas.  One of my colleagues didn't have any way of reaching anyone by phone and no one could reach her & her husband.  If you urgently needed to get ahold of them, you'd have to call their local police department to send someone out there to deliver the message.  It was literally like living in the 1800's.  And imagine this for 4 days or more.


Our electricity company released a press article this morning and here are some bits from it:

"Mobilizing the largest restoration force in ComEd history, the utility restored power to 95 percent of the 850,000 customers who were affected by one of the most severe storms on record, achieving its accelerated goal of restoring 95 percent of customers by midnight Thursday.  All remaining customers still without electricity could be back on line Friday.

With heavy rain, 18,000 lightning strikes and wind gusts of 80 mph, the storm toppled trees, snapped hundreds of utility poles and brought down miles of power lines.

ComEd has already replaced nearly 50 miles of wire and close to 300 poles and those numbers continue to grow. Comparable storms in terms of wind speed and customer impact are the hurricane storms that hit the U.S. coasts. Restoration times in those storms ranged from seven to 10 days.

“We understand that patience can be challenging particularly for those customers who are still without power,” said Frank M. Clark, ComEd chairman and chief executive officer. “We are using all the resources available to us, including crews from more than a dozen states, allowing us to restore service faster than any time in the last decade.”

With a contingent of 850 ComEd and out-of-state utility crews, working around the clock, less than 43,000 customers remain without power. ComEd restored more than 807,000 customers as of 11 p.m. Thursday."

I took these photos yesterday of some of the nearby damage.  You'll want to click on each picture to get a closer view, since these were taken with my cell phone camera and aren't the greatest quality.

 The tree to the far right used to be as tall as the one to the left.

This and the next two photos are 5 miles down the street from our house.

 

The gray colored spot at the middle right of the picture is this home's glass front porch, which you can see the tree missed by inches.